And so it came to pass that after a bunch of Weetabix-alikes for breakfast, I moved hostel. This one is a bit further out than I'd thought, actually, but is much nicer. It's twenty bucks for one night though, but eighteen per night if you book at least two (and there's a cheaper again weekly rate) so I paid for two with my second-last travellers' cheque, and then went to see about finding a job.
First I went back to where I'd come from and into that gaming shop, which is large and a bit dank and full of old gamey stuff - it's the best gaming shop I've ever seen. I spent ages just walking up and down each aisle looking at everything, and then went and asked the bloke if there's any chance of a job and he said sorry, they're in a state of flux at the moment (there's a notice in the windows outside actually about the problems they've been having lately) but I could check back in a few weeks just in case. Oh well. Pity, that would have been great.
Next stop was the travellers' centre thingie for a bit of Net access so I could check a government-run fruit-picking-related website to see what's going down in the Western Australia area. Not much... I got a couple of leads to phone up about and scribbled them down, but most of my two hours (aaahhh, worth waiting for) was spent in email and general browsery. Toward the end of it I checked the website I'd got most of my job leads from in Sydney, and it only said one thing in the Western Australia section, which was to talk to the people at the place where I currently was. Nice one! So I asked a bloke there and he said that they don't deal with such things directly, but here's a list of local backpacker-friendly recruitment agencies and also a brochure for somebody who deals specifically with travellers. So I went there, and the woman in charge wasn't there so I was to call back in about half an hour.
I bought some unleavened north African style bread for lunch (it was cheap, and reminds me of Egypt) and ate it with jam and smuggled honey and then went back over to where this place is. There was a bit of a queue, and it seemed to take quite a long time to deal with each person, so I asked if the computers they had there can be used by anybody or if you have to pay, and was told I could just sit down and get going, so I had another hour and a half or so of Net access. Yay! Then it was my turn to talk to the nice lady.
They offer a comprehensive service of job sourcing (I think that's looking for a job for me so I don't have to bother) and CV work and interview tips and tax sorting-out action and all sorts of stuff, but it costs seventy-five dollars plus tax to join. I have seventy-five dollars, but that'd leave me able to survive for about two more days before I'd be no longer running on financial fumes but completely and totally out. However, the nice lady said that there's farmy work available a couple of hundred kilometres south of Perth (a couple of hundred kilometres is a short distance) and I could go down there tomorrow and do that for a week or two and then come back if I wanted, or I could stay longer, and when I come back she can find me something else and I can use my new-found wealth to pay her. Fair enough, I wasn't too hot on the idea of shelling out to join some agency thing that offers services I can mostly perform myself for free, but since there's a guaranteed job in it I'm not gonna complain and I'll take the tax sortery-outery while we're at it. When I'd been waiting for my turn to come up I'd been lamenting my twinge of worry at whether I'd be able to find a job in time before my money would run out - I should have known this'd happen though, because things always work out like this for me. So I've to get a bus tomorrow at twenty past twelve, and there's another chap going down there too from the same agency so they'll introduce us tomorrow, and we'll be picked up and brought to a campsite, where we'll be sharing a site (which means I can afford to pay for a week - between half a campsite for a week, the bus ticket and food for the week I can just about exactly pay for it all). The pay, she said, is thirteen dollars or maybe a bit more an hour, for eight hours a day five days a week, which makes a nice number with three figures in it that starts with a four after tax, which means I can rebuild my emergency\Japan fund before too long (well, a few weeks) and also save up some fun money.
Needless to say, with my integral lucky streak proven once again in my hour of doubt I was in vaguely high spirits, and on the way home decided that it was about bloody time I went to see Kill Bill, especially if I'm off to the sticks tomorrow to live in a swag. Splashing out as soon as word of a bit of cash comes along is exactly the kind of thing you read about poor people doing in books like Tuppence to Cross the Mersey or Down and Out in Paris and London, but my mind was set and I could have worried about it, but I figured that if I'm doing it anyway I might as well enjoy myself, so throwing emotional caution to the wind I revelled in the stupidity of the plan (on the plus side, the idea occurred when I realised that I paid a key deposit of about the price of a cinema ticket which I'll get back tomorrow morning).
There are two strange incorrect conceptions people have of me when first meeting me. One is that I'm Canadian, from my accent. Loads and LOADS of people say this, which is strange I would have thought because Canadian isn't an accent you encounter that often. The other, which I've remarked upon once or twice in the past, is that I'm much younger than I am. And this one came up again when I was asked for I.D. by the girl selling cinema tickets. Holy crap, I'm SEVEN years older than the minimum age to get in. I ended up having to use my ancient student card that I carry around to remind myself how good-looking I've always been despite what my passport photo might say to the contrary, with its bizarrely garbled record of my date of birth.
I spent my time waiting for the movie playing pool with an English guy who borrowed my pen to write down phone numbers of lost property places because he left his iPod somewhere - ouch. He's in Australia for the rugby and liked Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown but not Reservoir Dogs.
I'd heard nothing but good about this movie, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I was a little underwhelmed. It seemed a bit inconsistent, the primary characters lack character and maybe I'm one of these short-attention-span products of the MTV generation that people are always complaining about and I appreciate that lingering on stuff for a long time can be effective because hell I like spaghetti westerns, but didn't he focus on some pointless stuff for far too long? But there was lots of good stuff about it too and although I found it difficult to suspend my disblief because I was trying to find where reality ends and the movie begins in the particular universe and setting it'd made for itself, perhaps that's because it's a new style. I haven't seen more than a handful of live-action Japanese movies so maybe it's aping that style very well, but maybe it's its own thing. But for my money Natural Born Killers does the same job much better, if the latter is the case.
So now I'm back here, and I've spent money on tomorrow night's accomodation that I can't get back, yah boo. Well, them's the breaks.